Getting Started with Pressbooks

Once you have imported your text into Pressbooks, you may find that you need to make some edits to get the text in the format that you would like.  If you have imported a text that consists of a number of chapters with large chunks of text, your editing will most likely be minimal.  Texts that contain verse, images, complicated formatting may require additional editing.

Common Issues when Importing into Pressbooks

Line Spacing

Occasionally you will find that imported text has either lots of extra blank lines or no blank lines at all.  To get a better sense of why this is happening, you can look at the text view of the chapter to see if there is additional coding in the text that is causing the problem.

Headings

When you import from another document, you may find that the way headings have been used in the original document do not align with best practices for heading use.  Headings should be used to outline the hierarchical structure of the document, but many times they are used solely to change the size of the font.

Chapters

Sometimes when you import a document you will find that all the content is imported into one chapter.  If this is the case, you will need to decide if it is easier to cut and paste the content into separate chapters or if you should edit the original document adding H1 headings at the beginning of each chapter and import again.

The editor in Pressbooks is similar to ones found in Word or Google Docs, but with some additional features tailored to academic texts.  The following guide books are great resources for learning more about Pressbooks.

BCCampus also has a series of short Pressbooks video tutorials that highlight some of the more common features of Pressbooks.  These videos reflect the BCCampus installation of Pressbooks, but most content is applicable to other Pressbooks sites.